Before Wikipedia, There Was Yongle: The World’s Largest Print Encyclopedia

In 1408, the Yongle Dadian encyclopedia held an estimated 11,000 handwritten volumes of human knowledge—the single largest compendium of information on Earth at the time. Now, it’s lucky to get a passing trickle of traffic on its brief, sad Wikipedia page.

Yesterday, Reddit user Andy_Griffith shared this piece of trivia with the Today I Learned community, noting that the Yongle remained the world record-holder for largest encyclopedia “until Wikipedia finally surpassed it in 2007. (To add insult to injury, Andy_Griffith’s source for this fact was—you guessed it—Wikipedia.)

Earlier this month, digital reference site broke the five million mark on its tally of English articles alone, and is charting a course to “provide the world with the sum of all human knowledge.”

But prior to September 2007, the title of largest encyclopedia ever compiled belonged to the Yongle, housed in the 15th century imperial court of Nanjing, China.

Named after the emperor who commissioned the book in 1403, the Yongle‘s authorial team consisted of over 2,000 scholars. (By contrast, Wikipedia has over 127,000 regular contributors.)

“An estimate of their content: 370 million characters on magnificent paper bordered with red silk, covered with perfect script in black lacquer with punctuation and notes in vermillion, all bound in imperial yellow damask silk.”

In fact, the finished product was so lavishly constructed that the emperor’s team completely blew their budget on the first copy.

As Jason König and Greg Woolf explain in Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance:

“… once this work was finished, under the supervision of chief editor Yao Guangxiao … there was no money in the imperial treasury to print it.”

According to Cambridge professor Joseph McDermott, the Yongle emperor did have the good sense to ask for two copies—but “his order was never implemented, ostensibly for reasons of expense.”

König and Woolf note that the government-funded encyclopedia project happened to take place during wartime—which depleted resources that could’ve helped print additional copies.

The dearth of copies would prove fatal for the Yongle encyclopedia, even after the government sponsored a second copy over 150 years later.

As Endymion Wilkinson writes in Chinese History, copies of the book got smaller and smaller in the ensuing centuries—suffering from theft, fire, looting, and even Anglo-French soldiers claiming volumes “as souvenirs” in 1860.

The Yongle‘s international reputation made stolen volumes popular among Western literati—and difficult to recover.

According to David Helliwell, one Chinese scholar had to purchase volumes of the encyclopedia from a London bookseller, who had placed them in a catalogue “formed by a gentleman of literary tastes and considerable expert knowledge during a residence in [Beijing] extending over several years.”

(Which is an exceptionally polite way of saying “stolen by a greedy British man.”)

Most scholars estimate that what remains of the Yongle encyclopedia is just under four percent of the original contents.

Some redditors took the story of the Yongle as a cautionary tale for our current reigning champion of human knowledge:

Of course, digital storage isn’t the only issue facing the site. It’s still subject to the occasional Internet vandal, political PR team, or good-natured prankster who believes actor Gary Oldman is a giraffe.

But before you start pining for the days of the Yongle, remember: Since 96 percent of the original book has been lost, who knows how many inaccuracies, “citations needed,” and accusations that Gary Oldman is a giraffe were lost along with it?